Maryland Newsline

• The exhibit's Web site has more facts about each woman.

• The Library of American Broadcasting houses the collections.

• Test your knowledge of women broadcasters with this interactive quiz.

Martha Brooks' show on WGY-Radio Schenectady in New York ran for almost 35 years. (Photo courtesy of the Library of American Broadcasting)

By Kendra Nichols
Maryland Newsline
Tuesday, March 15, 2005

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - Radio broadcaster Martha Brooks used to say her place was in the home.

Brooks, whose “Martha Brooks Show” aired for almost 35 years, commissioned an ad saying, “Martha Brooks is one woman whose place is definitely in the home – your home. And that’s just where you’ll find her, too. When you tune into WGY each morning, Monday through Friday, from 9:15 to 10:00.”

Of course, those were different times. Brooks’ ad ran more than 50 years ago at the midpoint of her broadcasting career at WGY-Radio Schenectady in New York. The message underscores that, like many female pioneers in broadcasting, Brooks had to balance audience expectations of her role with the competitive realities of a male-dominated field.

Brooks is now one of 16 women being celebrated at an exhibit at the University of Maryland’s Library of American Broadcasting. It's designed to correct people’s assumptions about the roles women played in the first stages of radio and TV news and entertainment.

“We’re kind of wedded to this idea that there were no women in the early days of broadcasting,” said Cary O’Dell, the main archivist for the exhibit. But, she added, “It didn’t start with Barbara Walters. These ladies had a lot of power.”

The exhibit draws from a group of collections containing more than 1,500 photos, 284 audio clips, 19 videotapes and thousands of pages of correspondence, scripts, notes, journals and other documents that span the careers of 16 women from 1926 to 1985.

Two additional library collections focus on an organization, American Women in Radio and Television, and a radio program, “Housewives’ Protective League.” But because there was so much information and not enough space, archivists chose only the 16 women’s collections to showcase in the exhibit.

The women made strides in radio and TV broadcasting, writing and producing. Some even held executive roles, such as Helen Sioussat, the former director of the Talks and Public Affairs Department at CBS from 1937 to 1958. She took over for her former boss, Edward R. Murrow, but not without a fight from higher-ups who thought a man should have the job.

“They didn’t see her as Murrow’s right hand,” said Chuck Howell, the broadcast library’s curator. “They just saw her as a glorified secretary.” The network executives hired a man for the job instead, but he didn’t last long. When the job opened again, Sioussat, with Murrow’s help, claimed it as her own.

The library has had the collections for some time now, but it wasn’t until 2003 that a National Endowment for the Humanities grant allowed archivists to process the mountain of information, make it available to researchers and create the exhibit, which is on display on the College Park campus. It took archivists nine months to wade through the documents and tapes.

The collection of scriptwriter Mona Kent, who wrote for the radio soap opera “Portia Faces Life” and worked as a creator and writer for several radio and TV soaps, has more than 3,500 radio and TV scripts alone.

Maurine Beasley, a member of the broadcast archive’s board of directors and a journalism professor at the university, endorsed and supported the project from its earliest stages. She said the exhibit is important because much of women’s experience in early broadcasting is ignored.

“These were very courageous pioneers in a field in which they faced a good deal of suspicion because of their gender,” she said.

And as a woman who received her journalism degree in the 1950s, Beasley said she can identify with them. “I think anybody – any woman in my era – found themselves in a situation in which they faced considerable discrimination,” she said. “We knew we were in a different category than our male colleagues.”

Most women broadcasters were given shows that were directed at a female audience: soap operas, fashion programs, cooking and gardening shows and what one ad called “woman talk.”

At the exhibit’s invitation-only opening reception March 16, Beasley will host a telephone question-and-answer session with the three women from the exhibit who are still alive: Helen Faith Keane, Fran Harris-Tuchman and Betty Ramey.

Keane, who hosted the “The Helen Faith Keane Show” for WABD-TV in New York City, is 104.

The exhibit, which is free and open to the public, will run through July on the University of Maryland’s College Park campus. It can be found in the Maryland Room of the university’s Hornbake Library. Hours will run Monday through Friday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Saturdays noon to 5 p.m. For more information, call (301) 405-9212.